Countdown: M Day (50 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Valour
is still
value.
The first duty for a man

is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear;

we cannot act at all till then.

—Thomas Carlyle,

On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History

Soesdyke-Linden Highway,

South of Cheddi Jagan Airport, Guyana

Mao flopped himself behind the berm fronting Larralde’s command bunker and slithered in. A stream of machine gun bullets followed him, chipping wood from the trees and raising meter-high spouts of dirt and dust from the berm.

“They’re not really trying, sir,” Arrivillaga announced. “This is a fucking feint.”

“Seems like they’re trying to me,” Larralde said.

“No …no. I got a good look. There’s not a single tank out there, only some armored cars—those old French jobs, I think—with guns. I figure I saw half of them and that half came to no more than ten vehicles. That’s a company, though maybe a big one, and it’s holding an entire battalion in place. But a company, attacking a battalion, is not serious. It’s playacting. And, somehow, I think the rest of their heavy battalion got across the Essequibo. Just a feeling, mind you, but I know of no contrary facts to dispute it.”

“Okay,” Larralde agreed, “they’re acting. And maybe they did cross the river in the night.” He dropped down to the bottom of the dugout, picked up a field telephone, and began to turn the crank to contact higher. He passed on Mao’s observation, and was duly tut-tutted away by the battalion operations officer.

“Look,” Larralde insisted, “just pass it on to brigade, will you?” Finally, in exasperation, he slammed the phone back on its cradle.

Hmmm …maybe I
should
have let Hugo relieve the lot of them.

“Battalion says not to worry about it.”

“Best proof possible that we
should
be worrying about it,” Arrivillaga countered.

“Yeah.” Changing the subject to something he
could
do something about, he asked, “How are the troops holding up?”

Mao gave a wicked and cynical grin. “Scared shitless, frankly. If I were the brigade commander I’d put a line of MPs out, about a kilometer back, to shoot on sight anyone who runs.”

“Casualties?”

Mao shook his head. “Not a one, which is another reason I think it’s a feint.”

“Hmmm …if it’s a feint here, I wonder where it won’t be.”

“East,” Arrivillaga answered. “The river’s too constricting to the west. Not that we can do much about that; it’s not even our
battalion
’s sector.”

Road to Saint Cuthberts, Guyana

The scouts, now rejoined to the mass of the battalion, were about five kilometers forward, moving in a ragged line to the north, slowly. Reilly had his own APC parked a half a klick south of the intersection. Dismounted, standing by the side of the road, he gave each of his subordinate units their final orders as they came abreast of him.

First came the battery. “Over there, one klick,” Reilly told Bunn, the battery commander. His good arm stretched to the northwest, showing the direction. “Priority of fires to the scouts, initially, then to me, personally.”

After the battery came C Company’s fifteen functioning tanks, plus a weapons platoon. Two more Jaguars were broken down along the road to the south with Dumisani and Viljoen’s crew trying desperately to get them moving again.

“Turn your mortars over to the battalion mortar platoon and your AT guns to the sergeant major,” Reilly ordered. “Up this road …form on line, center of mass four kilometers in, parallel to the road and north of it, oriented northwest. Assume we’re going to change to ‘armor, Alpha’ as soon as we break them.”

“Roger, sir,” Captain Green answered. “I’ll keep my first platoon on my left.”

“Good. Go.”

A Company arrived, three platoons of mechanized infantry with a section of Elands, another of mortars, and a brace of towed, 60mm antitank guns.

“You won’t need those for now,” Reilly said, pointing at the guns. “Turn them over to the sergeant major. Your mortars go to Master Sergeant Peters. For the rest, form up behind the tanks, south of the road, spread out to support them.”

Alpha drove off in the wake of Charlie. Peters’ six 120mm mortars came next. Peters spit tobacco juice over the side of his vehicle, then turned his attention to Reilly.

“Sergeant Peters, take control of those four mortars gaggling about. You all fall in behind the infantry. Don’t set up until I tell you, which isn’t going to be until you can range the airport. Then …” Reilly stopped speaking, listening for a moment to the chattering of massed machine guns, interspersed with a series of heavier blasts. Then he said, happily and with a broad smile, “I see the scout platoon has made contact.”

Soesdyke-Linden Highway,

South of Cheddi Jagan Airport, Guyana

“Ah, shit,” Mao said, as more firing broke out to the east. He repeated it as soon as he heard and felt the heavier blasts of a mass of cannon, firing from somewhere farther south. “I told you, didn’t I?” Scant seconds later, the shells from those cannon began falling somewhere on the sister battalion to the east. Again, Arrivillaga repeated, “Ah, shit.”

Suddenly the rate of cannon fire doubled, as some new battery, farther to the east, opened up.

“Heavy mortars,” observed Larralde. “No cannon can match that rate of fire. You were right, Top, this attack wasn’t serious.”

“So what the fuck do we do, sir? This is heavy tactical thinking. That’s your job, not mine.”

Larralde licked his lips and exhaled loudly. “You stay here. I’m taking First and Third Platoon and stretching them at right angle. You thin out Second to cover the entire front.” The major chewed at his lip for just a moment before shouting, “Go!”

As Larralde crept out from the command bunker, keeping carefully low lest that not serious attack on his company turn dreadfully serious for him, he heard something approximating music:

“I AM IRONMAN!”

“Now
that,
” Mao shouted after his commander, “that is
serious
.”

Tank Charlie Three-three,

Southeast of Cheddi Jagan Airport, Guyana

The basset hound didn’t need to be told to get down into the bustle rack. As soon as it heard the first rounds of machine gun fire, it padded over on its own.

Stupid humans,
it thought.
Disturbing my sleep for no worthwhile reason.
Even so, it knew its duties. The dog raised its muzzle and added its own voice—
Ahwooo
—to: “I AM IRONMAN.”

Wagner watched it go, then reached down to flick the lever that let his seat fall. Long experience let him flick it enough to drop him to where only the top of his head and his eyes peered out over the cupola. With one hand he reached back to pull the hatch to an almost closed position, over and protecting his head.

The grunts, still in their APCs, were about two to three hundred meters behind the line of tanks. Their machine guns rattled, rounds passing between the tanks, beating down any return fire that might have hurt their
Panzerkameraden.
It wasn’t quite sufficient to suppress all the return fire; the Venezuelans were sending back a pretty good volume of small arms.

Watching the bright dots of the tracers, Wagner’s eyes scanned for a target worthy of his main gun, the 105. He found it in the form of a bunker. Again he flicked the seat’s lever, falling down to where his eyes were parallel with the commander’s gun sight. He twisted the sight until he had a good view of the bunker.

“Gunner …HE, delay …one o’clock …bunker, with heavy machine gun,” Wagner ordered through the intercom.

The turret spun smoothly as it and the gun gave off a hydraulic whine.

“Target,” the gunner announced in a fraction of the second. The main gun already had a round of high explosive loaded.

“Fire!”

The tank rocked with the recoil. Peering again through his sight, Wagner saw a cloud of evil black smoke and a collection of splintered logs where the bunker had been. Immediately, he popped up again and began scanning for a new target. This was made considerably harder by the fact that Peters’ mortars were now in operation, tossing between them a hundred or more shells a minute at the Venezuelan lines. Angry orange flowers blossomed, then turned black. Even this far back, one could hear the whine of malevolent bits of shell casing, coursing through the air.

Wagner couldn’t see them, but was pretty sure that the grunts were now pouring out of their carriers like a horde of angry soldier ants in full “lunch-em” mode and forming up for an assault. He popped his seat almost all the way down, stood on it, and took over once again the heavy machine gun mounted in front of the commander’s cupola. Grasping the spade grips, one in each hand, he pressed his chest to the gun and automatically began to press the firing butterfly with his thumbs. The gun gave off a steady
thunkthunkthunkthunking
as it vibrated in Wagner’s hands and against his chest. The first burst was high, flying over a fighting position the sergeant thought not worth wasting a major round on. He shifted his aim lower and pressed the butterfly again.

The gun was badly out of sync with the music:

“PLANNING HIS VENGEANCE

THAT HE SOON WILL UNFOLD”

Behind the line of infantry, spreading out between their carriers and taking the prone, Reilly used binoculars to scan the Venezuelan line. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just some indicator that they were on the cusp of breaking. Cessation of return fire from the bunkers that the tanks were crushing into so much strawberry jam couldn’t say much about that. Each hit only indicated some of the enemy were dead, not that any of them were broken in spirit. The lessening of return fire helped a bit, but that was accounted for, in part at least, by death or wounds.

And one of the bastards with an RPG, holding his fire like a clever lad, could be the end of one of my crews.

No, what Reilly needed was …

Private Emilia Suarez—Second Squad, Third Platoon, Company A, First Parachute Battalion—could feel the hot urine running down her legs. Even so, she kept on with her job of breaking open boxes of machine gun ammunition and passing the bandoleers to the assistant gunner. The gun’s barrel was smoking already. Even if her terror, she hoped she wouldn’t have to help change the red hot barrel.

Suarez felt something like huge fists, lancing through the air to strike bags of meal. Before her eyes, the assistant gunner’s chest exploded in a shower of blood, bone fragments, and torn guts and lungs, while the gunner’s head simply disintegrated and disappeared, causing a red torrent to spray straight upwards for an eternal moment.

Still clutching in her hands the bandoleer she’d been about to pass to the AG, Suarez rocketed out of the machine gun bunker, then stood and ran, screaming her lungs out like some mad thing.

And
that’s
what I was looking for,
Reilly exulted. Sweeping his field glasses a little higher, he saw four or five more troops doing the bugout boogie to the rear. “Gotcha, ya fuckers.”

He picked up a microphone. Keying it cut off the music, allowing him to speak directly through the loudspeakers. It also sent out the same message via radio. “First Battalion! Into the assault …Forward.”

I always did like the way the Russians did
some
things,
Reilly thought, as his grunts arose, screaming, the tanks and APCs lurched forward, firing, and Black Sabbath resumed its soul-sucking chorus:

“NOW HE HAS HIS REVENGE!”

“Snyder? Reilly. Increase the pressure on the fuckers to your front. Now!

“
Faugh A Ballagh,
motherfuckers!” Clear the way.

The driver, Glass, heard the orders as well as Wagner had. On the word, “Forward,” he gave the tank full throttle, lunging at the enemy line. The acceleration pressed Glass back into his seat, even as it threw Wagner into the commander’s hatch, temporarily ruining the latter’s aim.

A single RPG round lanced out, striking the tank to Three-three’s left, next to the driver, in the overhang under the gun mantlet. The hot jet from the warhead must have burned through and struck a ready shell, because the tank exploded in an instant, the turret blown high into the air, spinning. Fires erupted, shooting upward from the now vacant turret ring and the still occupied driver’s hatch.

With a curse—those had been his friends in that tank!—Wagner swung his machine gun over, peppering the spot from which the RPG appeared to have been launched with heavy chunks of bronze-jacketed lead:
Thunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunkthunk.

Others joined their fire to his. It was apparently too much for the enemy soldier who had destroyed the tank. Wagner spotted a single man, running pell-mell to the rear. He fired and missed; fired and missed. On the third burst, after a quick adjustment of aim, followed by a long, ten-round stream, the Venezuelan antitank gunner’s legs went one way, while his body, spinning head over blood-gushing stumps, went the other.

Wagner laughed madly with the satisfaction of revenge, then ceased fire, scanning to his front for a worthy target.

Every tank’s cannon was firing high explosive as fast as the loaders could sling in rounds and the gunners could find a target. Even so, the amount of steel falling on the Venezuelan line lessened as the mortars lifted off and shifted their fires farther to the northwest. The general area of the defenders’ line was draped with thick, black smoke.

Glass nosed the tank into the smoke, then farther into it. It was hard to see in any detail, but he made it a point to run over any bodies he spotted lying on the ground. He couldn’t see the results, but could easily imagine them bursting like grapes as the tracks pressed out any semblance of life. Once he thought he heard a scream from one of the grapes.

The tank lurched over a fighting position, then bounced down as the logs that made that position’s overhead cover gave way, snapping and collapsing themselves and the dirt they’d carried. Fifty meters on, the smoke began to thin, revealing a disorganized flock of uniformed Venezuelans fleeing, mostly weaponless, for their lives. Over the driver’s head the tanks’ coaxial machine gun began to chatter, sweeping rounds across the panicking enemy, chopping them down like scrub brush.